Saturday, January 3, 2009

It was Mr. Sergei Podbereschi of 5pm™ asked me to review the flagship product of QG software - 5pm™. 5pm™ is a web based Project Management tool built with common ‘Web 2.0’ features. The PHP scripted website powered with AJAX, functions as good as a desktop application.
Basically 5pm™ helps Projects Teams to plan, execute and control projects in a ‘collaborative’ way , no matter the team members are present physically in one location or not.Virtual ‘teams’ or groups formed can manage single or multi-projects (project Groups),seamlessly.

5pm™ is a very basic PM tool. The concept and the interface planning is good and bears a lot of scope for additional features and enhancement. I am not going to list out what is missing in 5pm™, since while comparing with products like Primavera, it is better to list out “what it has got”!

Again going back to the USP, simplicity is the key word. Not every one in the industry needs a fully equipped PM tool like Primavera. As I wrote in one of my previous articles, there is more number of ‘small projects’ globally than large and medium scale projects combined!
What they need basically is a tool to make a basic plan (a gantt chart) , record activity progress, communicate via e-mail /messages and share documents. 5pm™ provides these features.

I have found many companies implementing enterprise project management package and use it solely for making gantt charts which can be created using numerous free tools available online !

I have tried the application today and I am going to write a fully blown review here. To assist ‘busy’ people who are not interested in so many details, let me put the summary right here:

Overall Outlook:
Nice initiative but quite preliminary. Good for small – low critical projects with limited team size only.
Ideal for companies who require a simple project management tool which can be implemented and operated with minimum administrative effort.

Pros
• Easy to use - simple user interface
• Very fast
• Good collaborative features (Sharing, notification..etc)
(Rest of the features are generally expected from any web based PM tools, so I am not listing them)Cons
• Very basic (Even task dependency feature is missing! – so planning is quite manual!)
(‘Very basic’ comment is applicable to all the aspects of the application starting from planning, monitoring, controlling, reporting and data handling)

Getting started with 5pm™:

1) Creating online Pm portal with 5pm™
Route your browser to http://www.5pmweb.com/ which will open the home page of 5pm™.

5pm™ gives the following usage plans:

Free trial option comes with following features:

Validity : 14 Days

Number of user accounts : 1000

Number of Projects : 1000

Storage space : 15 MB

Features: Full features enabled

This means, prospective customers can take full assessment of this tool at absolutely no cost with out compromising anything!
Click the “Sign up” tab to follow a simple registration process. You may have to provide a ‘name’ for the portal which will help you to designate a third level domain ID to operate your account (yourcompany. 5pmweb.com). Apart from ‘name’ , you may have to provide your valid e-mail ID & password. This user will be powered with “Admin” rights, how ever the same can be degraded once other user accounts are created and should you require transferring admin rights to another user.
2) Logging in and experimenting with 5PM user interface :

Once the account is created you can route your browser to yourcompany. 5pmweb.com. Login with the given e-mail & password.

Valid login will take you to the welcome page ("Projects" Tab):

User interface is pleasing and well arranged. Split pane interface design is implemented with “List” and “Preview” panes. The right pane lists out Groups, Projects and activities under hierarchal way. The elements can be filtered for own activities, group’s or the entire company’s. Elements can be sorted based on the following parameters:

Click the “Settings” link on top header to launch the General settings dialog.

3) Create our first project

The hierarchy followed in 5PM is Groups >Projects>Activity

There is an auto reminder option, which can alert you task deadlines. An option for calendar settings also provided. Once you are happy with the general settings, click “OK” to apply them and get started.
Groups can be edited by right clicking over “All Groups” and selecting “Edit Groups”.

The project can be created under any group (Eg: API Division) if you wish, or you may leave it under “no group” as I did here. “Project Team” can be formed by adding user profiles to Project team list box. Start & Deadline dates can be selected using a date picker:

Date picker does not provide facility to “Jump” to any specific Month or Year. This is a serious draw back.

Select other parameters appropriately and click “OK” to create your first project in 5PM.

Now its time to add activities to the project. Click “+Add” button again and select “Activity”

A “Task team” can be formed by adding available profiles (users) to Task team.
Repeat this again to add some more activities to the project. Select notification options as you wish. I got this notification in my Gmail, when I added the above activity:

Activities can be easily edited by right clicking them and choosing the appropriate menu item.

We can either record progress by adding a progress note or simply mark it as done , once completed. Progress recording is limited to 10%, 25%, 50%, 70%, 90% and 100%. Activities can be duplicated by selecting ‘Clone”

There is a field “Time Spent”, but I am not sure whether it is total effort in the activity or just duration. Maximum 100 hours 45 minutes are allowed to book per activity.
Messages can be posted to any activity or project:

Files can be added to “The whole Project” or to the specific “Activity”. For this, select any project or activity from the left pane and click “+Add” and select “Files” from right pane.

This file will be accessible to the project team under the selected activity. Addition of new file can be notified to Project Team / Task team or client.
“Files” tab in right pane shows list of files uploaded under selected project / activity.

The “Info” tab in the right pane gives summary of the selected Project or Activity

Any items / files added by a specific user can be found under the “My Stuff” tab in the left pane.

Now let’s take an overall look at the control panel:

Now lets move on to the “Time Line” tab in the extreme left of left pane.

4) Project Gantt Chart in 5PM

Time line / Gantt chart is basically an Adobe Flash™ application. It provides common features like “date range”, “Daily view”, “Weekly View” and “Monthly View”. Panning is possible with “hand tool” provided, how ever zooming facility is not there.

Current date is highlighted in orange colour. Project horizon (Period between project start date and deadline date) is highlighted in dark blue.This helps to identify any activity falling outside the deadline. I have not inspected the calendar capabilities, how ever I assume the gannt chart is taking care of the calendar preferences (Otherwise it is a serious flaw!).

Projects and Activities can be stretched or dragged to change the start & finish dates. Early completion is marked as green and “Lagging” or trailing activities are marked red.

Thatz all about the time line / gant chart application in 5PM. Now lets move to reporting section

5) Reporting in 5PM
Reports are basically extracted from the daily logs for the selected period.

I have found very minimal reporting features in 5PM, as follows:
a) Time Report :

Time report is not providing any facility to book time spent by each person in performing an activity. Such feature is common and help in claims and client billing , is absent.

b) General report:

There is an option to export the report to Excel (.CSV format).The out put may look like the following:

6) Profiles

The bottom most tab in the left pane is “Profiles”. This is where you can find various people in your network. “Latest Activity” [sound ‘Twitte’r ? ;) ] , contact information and security level are displayed. This information will be handy for team members for communication.

Users can be added , deleted or modified:

There is an option to add multiple users at one shot.
A facility to import contacts from external mail like Gmail also provided under “+Add” menu.

7) Search facility

Search facility is provided and it can be accessed from the “Projects” tab in the left pane.

8)Data Security
Now this is a big deal. Security of data. Projects can be secretive and even can have proprietary or confidential information which possess potential business risk.
Data communication is encrypted by 256-bit High-grade Encryption authenticated by Thawte Inc. 5PM also use independent security audits to check our servers and keep them secure. Data backup is done nightly to two different offsite locations.5PM has chosen LiquidWeb(tm) for their hosting needs. 5Pm also claim to monitor their servers with a third-party server monitoring service.
They process payments through "Pay Pal" and dont store customer credit card information.

9) Getting Help

5PM claims they have "Heroic Support® engineers". I really dont know whether they act in films ;). Jokes apart, 5PM provides demos & FAQ in their website. They also claim to have 24 X 7 help desk. (Paragraph deleted after receiving clarification about support services from 5PM)

5PM Provides demo videos in their website for basic & advanced features of the application.They also claim to have a fast and responsive help desk. "LiquidWeb" , who provide the hosting service, supports 5PM with their dedicated engineers titled "Heroic Support® engineers".

10) Summary

I believe, I have reviewed most of the features and quite enjoyed doing that!
Web based applications are becoming more and more complex and they may replace many of the common desktop applications. Google is already moving confidently with this strategy. Document processing, image manipulation, database applications ... you name any domain of enterprise desktop software, there is a web equivalent. With ajax , now web applications have user controls similar to their desktop counterparts. Recent advancements in internet bandwidth facilitate heavy data handling through network giving the user ‘realtime’ experience!

I wish all the best to the 5PM team for their effort and as I indicated in the overview, the software is in very basic stage and there is a lot of scope for improvements. I hope the 5PM team will closely work with clients (from a range of industries practicing Project Management) and upgrade the application based on the user feed back.

It is an application worth trying and you have the luxury of using it fully featured for 14 days.

Not in the mood for working? Dont worry 5PM website has got an answer for that also. They have a Flash based game called "Office Space" which can be accessed fromhere.

There were other product teams at this company, but there wasn't much integration between our products at that stage. Getting two of our products to run on the same machine was considered an interesting but academic exercise, and we were all mildly impressed whenever one of the QA or Support guys actually managed it.